Mail

Have you come to dread a certain type of email? You know—the “what we did on our vacation” letter comprising a brief message and a jumble of attached photos?

Here’s how to make quick sense of such missives in Apple Mail, using one of Leopard’s new Quick Look functions.

First, click the Quick Look button in the email’s header.

All attached images now appear in a convenient and attractive slideshow.The icons along the lower edge of the slideshow screen let you play the slideshow, step through the images one at a time, view them simultaneously in a photo grid, expand them to fill your screen, and add your favorites to your iPhoto library.You can also scroll through the images using your left- and right-arrow keys.

Mail Older Than One Year:

If you’ve got email that’s more than a year old just clogging up your Inbox (and taking up valuable space), you can use a Smart Mailbox to help you do some fast email house cleaning.

Just Control-click on the email account (or your Inbox if you don’t have multiple accounts) that you want to clean up, and then choose New Smart Mailbox from the contextual menu.When the Smart Mailbox dialog appears, from the first criteria pop-up menu on the left, choose Date Received.From the next pop-up menu over, choose “is before the date,” and in the final field, type a date that is approximately one year before today.Click OK and all your email that is one year old (or older) will appear in that Smart Mailbox.To delete that old email, just click on the Smart Mailbox, press Command-A to select all the email, then press the Delete key on your keyboard.

Now, the nice thing is that tomorrow more one-year-old email will appear in that Smart Mailbox (thanks to its live updating), and the next day, and the next day, and so on, so your mailbox never has more than one year of archived messages.So, about once a month, click on that Smart Mailbox and easily delete all the old email.

Create an iCal Event from Apple Mail:

Leopard is smart—smart enough to recognize dates within the text of an email in Apple Mail.

When your cursor hovers over a date in the body of an email, a dotted rectangle surrounds the date, and a small arrow appears.Hold on the arrow, and up pop two iCal options: Create New iCal Event and Show This Date in iCal.Choosing Create New iCal Event generates a dialog box. Its default name is the subject line of the original email, though you can change it here. You can also specify the location and duration of the event and add additional notes. When you’re finished, choose Add to iCal. Leopard adds the date to your calendar—without even opening iCal.

Not sure if you’re available? Choose Show This Date in iCal. This opens iCal at the date in question, but doesn’t add the event to your schedule.

Resizing Photos for Emailing:

Have you ever noticed how freaked out relatives get when you email them high-res photos from your six- or eight-meg digital camera? For example, your grandmother in Minnesota may not have Photoshop CS4, and so dealing with that 26MB, 41-inch-wide photo you shot with your eight-meg camera might put a strain on her system. That’s why you might want to reduce the size of those photos you’re about to email. You don’t even have to launch Photoshop — because you can do the resizing right within Mail.

After you attach a photo to your email message (you can just drag-and-drop the image into the New Message window), take a look in the bottom-right corner of your email message window, and you’ll see a pop-up menu where you can choose the Image Size you’d like to send. As soon as you choose a size (other than Actual Size), the image is immediately scaled down right within the email message window so you can see the exact size of the photo you’re sending.

Emailing Web Pages:

If you run across a web page you want to share with a friend, don’t send her a link to it — send her the page itself. Just press Command-I and a dialog will appear, asking for the email address of the person you want to send this web page to. Just enter her email address, along with your text message, and click send, and it will send the contents of that page (complete with graphics, formatting, links, etc.) to your friend. She’ll be able to see that page right within her email application.

Email Attachments Made Easy:

If you want to attach a file to an email message, you can drag the file directly to Mail’s icon in your Dock. This opens Mail and creates a brand-new email message window with that file already attached. Sweet! Better yet, even if you drag multiple attachments, they all attach to just one email message (rather than creating one message for each attachment, as in previous versions of Mac OS X).

Create Custom Email Stationery:

Leopard’s enhanced Mail program has a cool new feature: a set of professionally designed stationery templates you can use to spiff up your email.

But you can also create your own custom stationery templates. Here’s how.

Create a new email message. Add the elements you’d like to appear each time you load the template, like a signature line. You can also add dummy text to delete later, if you wish.

Under the Format menu, choose Show Fonts and Show Colors and use the Font and Color palettes to specify fonts, text size, colors, and type effects to suit your taste. (Note that the colors you choose for backgrounds might not show up until you’ve saved your stationery and opened a new message.)

Use the Format menu to set text alignment and styles. You can even add graphic elements, such as photos or logos. When you’re satisfied with your work, choose Save as Stationery from Mail’s File menu. The program will prompt you to name your creation.

When you want to load your template, create a new message and click the Show Stationery button. You’ll see the Apple templates, organized in folders. (You may need to scroll down to see all the folders.) At the bottom of the list is a new folder, Custom, where your template resides. Any additional templates you create will be stored in the Custom folder as well.

Select the Custom folder, double-click on the icon for your stationery, and the template appears, ready for you to add new text. When you’re done writing your new message, send like any other email.

Remember, though: The design professionals who created the Apple templates are professionals for a reason.

Email a Web Link Instantly:

Have you ever found a web page that you can’t wait to share with a friend or colleague? Leopard offers a great way to share such web links. Here’s how:

1. In Safari’s address bar, select the URL for the page you’re browsing.2. Pull down the Safari menu.3. Highlight the Services option and select, first, Mail and then Send Selection from the hierarchical menus that pop up.

Mac OS X Leopard automatically starts Mail (if the application’s not already open), creates a new email message, and places the selected web link in the body of the email document. All you have to do is enter the email addresses of your recipients, add a subject, and include a note about the web link.

Add an RSS Feed to Mail:

In Leopard — the best version of Mac OS X ever — the versatile Mail program offers a great new feature. Its built-in RSS support lets you read the RSS feeds you subscribe to. That means you can use the same application to read both your mail and your favorite RSS feeds.

Let’s say you visit the Apple Hot News page all the time and would like to be notified when new Hot News articles appear. To do so,

1. Launch Safari and go to the Hot News page.2. Click the RSS icon in the Address Bar and the browser window will change to display Hot News as a series of single-line RSS feeds.3. Click the + button at the top of the page as if you were going to create a bookmark for this page.4. In the sheet that drops down, click the checkbox next to Mail; then click the Add button.5. In the Mailboxes sidebar, Mail automatically creates a new folder to hold all your RSS feeds and puts Apple Hot News to the new folder.

To browse the feeds, simply click on Apple Hot News and Mail displays the headlines of all the articles in the Message pane. Click any of the headlines to have the Hot News article displayed in full. To visit the source of the Hot News article, click the Read more link, and Mail will open (or switch to) Safari and display the page.

Quickly Email a Photo:

You can quickly email a photo to one or more friends or colleagues by grabbing the photo with your mouse, dragging it to the Dock, and dropping it on the icon of the Mail application.

Mac OS X will immediately open Mail (if it’s not already open) and create a new Mail message with your photo already enclosed. You simply have to add recipients and click Send. If you select multiple photos, Mac OS X will put them all into a single mail file.

Email a PDF:

“Send me a pdf pdq,” your headhunter tells you. And you smile. Because you know that, thanks to Mac OS X, you can create and dispatch a PDF in seconds. Here’s how:

What applications let you do this? All of them. Creating PDFs — and emailing them — is a feature built into Mac OS X, so whether you’re surfing the web in Safari, writing a business plan in Pages, honing a budget in Numbers, working on a presentation in Keynote, or updating your resume, you can create a PDF and email it quickly and easily.

Add Email Accounts to Apple's Mail:

Every Mac comes with Apple's very own killer email client.It's called Mail, and in our opinion, it's one of the greatest applications ever.Thanks to Mail, you don't have to check each of your separate email accounts online anymore.Just pop them all into Apple's Mail and you can read all of your messages in one simple application.

But how do you get your email accounts into Mail?Or, if you're already using Mail, how do you add other email accounts?We'll show you how to do it!Open the Mail application.You can find it in the Applications folder, and it's usually also on your Mac's Dock.

From the File menu, select Add Account.:

Select your email account type from the Account Type menu.

Generally speaking, most email accounts are POP accounts.

Enter your full name and email address.

Click Continue.

Enter your incoming mail server (also known as the POP server), user name, and password.In some cases, your user name might be your full email address.If you don't have this information, contact your service provider.

Click Continue.

Mail will now try to log into the POP server you provided.If the test fails, click continue anyway.(Mail's test doesn't always work -- even if you've provided the correct information.)